The spiritual response to the riots was given by Tariq Jahan after he learned that his 20-year-old son had been killed defending Birmingham mosques from rioters. Logic and emotion determined that Haroon's death should trigger rage and vengeance; there were already Asians getting ready to hit back at black people – it's the logic of crowds – when Tariq pleaded for calm, saying it wasn't a race issue, and reminding people of their common humanity.

Singlehandedly and spontaneously Tariq Jahan forestalled a race riot – because his faith gave him a larger view. He could surrender his son ("He gave him to me and He took him back. He was God's gift to me") without exacting a price. That made possible his forgiveness, and brought the violence to a stop.

But the spiritual response also came before Haroon's death, when the local mosques and businesses decided to stand together as a community and defend the area. That kind of response does not happen spontaneously; it requires an organised civil society, one where relationships of trust between people and their institutions have already been forged in common actions. The Jahans' Dudley Road mosque, it turns out, is part of a network of religious congregations brought together by community organisers trained by Citizens UK to promote living wages and safer streets.

Religious leaders and commentators have been no better than others at analysing the causes of those four nights of terror and lawlessness. You don't need faith to grasp the hatred and alienation in the hard core of the looters, or the moral frailty of those who were lured by free stuff and violence.

In the same way, you don't need to be leftwing to point to the surge in youth joblessness, wealth inequality, or bleak housing; nor to lament the crippling stagnation in social mobility among the working poor. You don't need to be rightwing to deplore the devastation on children wrought by divorce and cohabitation, or to lament the failure of education and culture to instil values and virtues. And you can be entirely axe-less and still be stunned by the consumerist nihilism of the looters, and be struck by how it mirrors that of greedy bankers or fiddling MPs.

Everyone can see it. The massive expansion of personal autonomy – the aim of the liberal project in both society and market – has ended in a morally denuded libertarianism.

But here's the thing. It seems that only faith that knows how to respond, like Tariq Jahan, decisively and immediately, in the places where it matters, with actions that heal and solve. I don't just mean proving shelter to those torched out of their homes, or helping to sweep up the streets, but something much deeper and lasting: using the riots as an opportunity to build trust.

I've been talking to community organisers in London Citizens, part of the Citizens UK network, and they've been telling me amazing stories about how young people in their member mosques and churches have been bringing cakes and flowers to shops in Croydon and Ealing and Woolwich, and how traders have been keenly signing up to a scheme called CitySafe.

The idea of CitySafe, which London Citizens began in south London following the death of Jimmy Mizen, is that it must be civil society that takes primary responsibility for street safety. As Saul Alinsky, the father of community organising, observed from 1930s Chicago, gangs only prosper when they are more organised than the communities around them. Crime, gangs, riots – these are the consequences of a society where people don't know each other, where social relations have been reduced to the commercial or contractual.

It works like this. Schools and churches and mosques are brought into relationship. Then people from those institutions go out on to the streets to meet the shopkeepers, who in turn are brought into relationship with local young people. A series of protocols and pledges are made, and the shops are declared "CitySafe havens". It takes patient work by community organisers and local community (mostly faith) leaders, but it's effective. Street by street, London is being taken back from the gangs this way.

It's the only way to reverse the cycle. Social disintegration, when it begins, has an inexorable logic to it, and it is all downhill. Where people are vulnerable, violence takes root, and a cycle of dehumanisation begins. The cold facelessness of our modern city has drained empathy away. The savagery of the looter, who sees only "stuff", meets the iron fist of the state, seeking deterrence and retribution. A society built on the expansion of personal autonomy must inevitably become ever more authoritarian.

That's why, in Woolwich, where young people from local institutions have been bringing cakes and flowers to the shops, traders have been asking to join CitySafe. They have realised that they don't even know each other, yet alone the young people in the communities on which they depend.

That's the spiritual response to the riots. Like Tariq Jahan's noble speech, it stands outside the cycle and builds trust. It starts from recognising that a liberal society, for all its benefits, is incapable of generating from within itself the values and virtues on which our freedom truly depends.

It knows that a disorganised society, lacking in bonds of trust, is destined to be dominated by gangs and an ever harsher police response. And it understands that faith, as the principal generator of social capital, will see the riots as an opportunity to build from what has fallen apart.